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1 week ago | 
wsj.com | Karen Wilkin
The American painter’s first major retrospective, now at the Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston, paints a thorough portrait of his artistic progression. BostonA painting by Stanley Whitney is easy to identify: a not-quite-regular grid of bold colors with assertive horizontal strokes for emphasis. But recognizing this distinctive image is not enough. We have to approach, slow down and pay attention.
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2 weeks ago | 
wsj.com | Karen Wilkin
Conservation efforts by Save Venice restore the radiant colors and empathetic forms of the painter’s monumental work. Tintoretto’s “Crucifixion” in this city’s Sala dell’Albergo (“board room”) of the Scuola Grande di San Rocco, completed in 1565, provokes hyperbole, and not just because of its impressive size—a monumental 17 by 40 feet.
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2 months ago | 
wsj.com | Karen Wilkin
Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts offers the first major exhibition devoted to these canvases, featuring 14 of the works Van Gogh created of the postman and his wife and children in the late 1880s. At the beginning of 1888, Vincent van Gogh, about to turn 35 years old, moved from Paris, where proximity to the Impressionists had expanded his abilities as a painter, to the Provençal town of Arles.
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Mar 22, 2025 | 
wsj.com | Karen Wilkin
New YorkWhat is conjured up by “Weimar Republic”—the democratic government of Germany between 1919 and 1933, the fraught years between the nation’s defeat in World War I and its takeover by the Nazi Party?
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Mar 1, 2025 | 
msn.com | Karen Wilkin
Continue reading More for You Continue reading More for You
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Mar 1, 2025 | 
wsj.com | Karen Wilkin
Los AngelesOn Sept. 19, 2011, the front page of the Boston Globe featured a painting of a nude man, seen from behind, toweling off. The paper stressed that the Boston Museum of Fine Arts was deaccessioning works to acquire the “Impressionist masterpiece,” noting its importance and rarity. “Every great museum in the world would want this picture,” the MFA’s director said. The painting?
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Feb 22, 2025 | 
wsj.com | Karen Wilkin
New YorkIn 1924, J.P. Morgan Jr., known as Jack, opened his late father’s private collection to the public as the Pierpont Morgan Library. Its first director was Belle da Costa Greene (1879-1950). She had been Pierpont’s librarian from 1905 until his death in 1913, although the term, Greene’s preferred, seems inadequate to her deep knowledge, acute eye, fine negotiating abilities, and—yes—meticulous cataloging skills.
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Jan 14, 2025 | 
newcriterion.com | David Yezzi |Eva Resnikova |Karen Wilkin |Sarah Ruden
Fiction: Lawrence Venuti and Michael Wood on Dino Buzzati’s The Bewitched Bourgeois, at McNally Jackson Books at the Seaport (January 16): In the fall of 2023, our fiction critic, Andrew Stuttaford, commended to readers a new translation of Dino Buzatti’s Il deserto dei Tartari (1940), now issued as The Stronghold—a shadowy, suggestive novel about life in a frontier garrison that may have been “[a]n oblique response to Kafka’s The Castle.” That volume’s translator, Lawrence Venuti, and...
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Jan 13, 2025 | 
newcriterion.com | David Yezzi |Eva Resnikova |Sarah Ruden |Karen Wilkin
It’s often said that an immortal monkey, sitting at a typewriter with no deadline and jabbing at random, will eventually produce the complete works of Shakespeare. For a human being who speaks English, this ought to take somewhat less than forever. An Elizabethan or Jacobean playwright, in turn, is natively proficient in early modern English and knows the work, and possibly the man, well. He may have cowritten a play or two with Shakespeare, and some of the Bard’s stuff, he feels, is really his.
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Jan 13, 2025 | 
newcriterion.com | David Yezzi |Eva Resnikova |Sarah Ruden |Karen Wilkin
Yesterday, Igor Levit returned to Carnegie Hall, as he does frequently—as all great musicians should, I think. Carnegie Hall should present the best, regularly. But this does not always work out. For the reasons, consult industry insiders (who do not include me). Arcadi Volodos has not appeared in Carnegie Hall since 2003. Grigory Sokolov, since 1975. Like Igor Levit, they are Soviet-born pianists. You can see all three at the Salzburg Festival every summer.
